At the Measuring Search Engine Marketing Success session, I had the pleasure of presenting along side Brian Donnahue (IQContent) and Nick Walsh (Net Affinity). Moderated by Danny Sullivan, the session looked at the tools available as well as an overall process for measuring search marketing successes.

It was great to see ‘measurement’ taking such a prominant role at a one day event with around 70+ people at this session. For me the key take away was – whatever you use you your web site for, measure and understand its traffic.

A separate though very interesting session was ‘Ad Agencies and Search‘. Damian Burns from Google presented some novel ideas that had been used by some of the more pro-active media agencies integrating search with off-line campaigns. For example in his Pontiac demo, the tv campaign ended with a call for the viewer to go and search online for what people are saying about their car – contrary of the prevailing agency view of begining with search.

This was the first search marketing event to be held in Ireland and appears to have been a great succuss with 400+ attendees – Congrats to Martin Murray and his team on organising a smooth running conference (the Baroque Chapel really was something else for presenting in).

The SMW presentations can be downloaded here: www.searchmarketingworld2007/presentations.htm

Mel, John, Teddie, Damian and Caragh – thanks for the drinks.